


Friends of Necessity

by Mnemosyne_Elegy



Category: Fairy Tail
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Friendship, Gen, Last-minute friendships, Mostly a Gray character study, Slow fade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:32:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23472508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mnemosyne_Elegy/pseuds/Mnemosyne_Elegy
Summary: Porlyusica probably wouldn't have given that stupid boy a second look if he wasn't dying. But Gray is dying slowly, and she gets caught up in his orbit as she plies him with useless medications. An odder last-minute friendship there may never be, but necessity and tragedy can draw together the most unlikely of people and sometimes the most beautiful things are the shortest-lived.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, sorry, this is going to be no one's favorite either lol I know, no one actually cares about Porlyusica. If it helps any, this is still really a character study of Gray, specifically from a different perspective than the normal guild. But anyway, I'm surprisingly fond of it. Porlyusica is a fun character, actually lol

* * *

**Part 1**

* * *

When the boy comes stomping up to Porlyusica's home and bangs on the door like he has any right to disturb the blessed silence, she almost chases him right back out. She has come to learn that Fairy Tail mages always bring trouble with them and are significantly more irritating than the average human. But if she turns the brat away and he tattles, Makarov might come storming down to wheedle and cajole. She has no desire to be sweet-talked into babysitting a guild of brats by that old geezer.

"Make it quick," she snaps, cracking the door open just enough for him to squeeze through but not enough to make it a comfortable fit. If he's bothered by the inhospitable welcome, he doesn't show it.

"I've been feeling kind of off for a few weeks," he explains. He's looking around curiously at the bottles lining the shelves, and Porlyusica seethes silently. She wants to tell him to mind his own business and keep his eyes to himself, but she holds her tongue so that he gets on with his story and doesn't waste any more of her time. "I'm not sure exactly when it started. I think maybe after this one job we went on where Natsu–"

"For the love of all things holy!" she bursts out, her resolution cracking apart at the seams. "Could you _be_ any slower?"

He has the grace to look a little chagrined. "Sorry," he mumbles.

"Just get _on_ with it. I don't need your life story. Just give me your symptoms already. I'm a healer, not a therapist."

So he clears his throat and rattles off a list of symptoms: dizziness, two brief but unsettling blackouts, odd muscle pains, headaches, occasional bouts of slippery control with his magic, delayed reaction times and random muscle spasms like he doesn't quite have full control of his limbs anymore. Porlyusica draws some blood, runs some tests, checks his vitals, inspects him for any magical abnormalities.

"It's probably not a big deal," the boy says as he's poked and prodded. "Just… I've never had those kinds of symptoms before. I thought maybe they'd pass if I gave it a few days, but I think maybe they're getting worse. I wanted to make sure I didn't, like, get hit with a curse or something."

Personally, Porlyusica is inclined to agree that this is a false alarm. She suspects that he's exaggerating the unfamiliar symptoms, either because he's a lying human or because he has no way of measuring how normal or abnormal they might be. Over the years, she has come to realize that she can't rely solely on the patient's perception of their illness. They can't view their own symptoms objectively and don't have the proper training to know how strange or dangerous they might be. It hurts, it's unfamiliar, they feel bad, so obviously something is wrong and it must be a big deal.

Still, the boy doesn't seem particularly concerned. He has the immortal nonchalance of youth. Young people, she thinks with a sniff. They always make everything far more dramatic than it needs to be or brush it all off because they're young and invincible and can just take a spoonful of medicine at bedtime to chase off their ills. Young mages are the worst, particularly a bunch like Fairy Tail that has survived the impossible over and over again.

It's better than having a blubbering mess on her floor, though. She hates the overdramatic ones the most.

Thankfully, the boy senses her foul mood and sits quietly while she makes her examination. She notes a couple slight abnormalities in the physical exam, but nothing too noteworthy.

Then she retrieves the test results.

She blinks down at them once, twice. She studies the samples with a frown and examines the data gleaned from them again.

She draws another blood sample.

" _More_ tests?" the boy sighs, but falls quiet again.

She runs the tests again. The results are the same.

"Well?" the boy asks expectantly. He darts an impatient glance out the window, where the sun has peaked and is now softening towards evening. He has been stuck here for hours waiting for the tests to run their course, and even humans' patience wears thin eventually.

Porlyusica hesitates.

"Gray," she says, because she seems to recall that being his name.

He looks back at her, eyes wide and clear and innocent. Ignorant. Blissfully so.

She has never had trouble speaking her mind before, but now the words catch in her throat.

How do you tell a child that he's dying?

* * *

There's poison in his cells, eating them from the inside out. There's something in his brain, slowly shutting his body down one piece at a time. It will shut down his muscles, break down his bones, eat away at his magic, slow his nervous system, and, eventually, stop his heart.

"Degeneration," she explains with clinical detachment.

The boy—Gray—takes the news stoically. His dark eyes are shadowed, his expression shuttered. She eyes him cautiously, anticipating hysterics, but it seems he's still in shock. She hopes he's gone by the time that wears off. She can't abide hysterics.

"How long?" he asks.

"A while. It's been festering for a long time. Either genetic or a mutation or something provoked by magic. Possibly a combination of–"

"No," he interrupts. "How long do I have?"

She knew that, of course. Maybe it was selfish of her to make him say the words because she didn't want to.

"Six months, maybe? Possibly a little longer. Your deterioration has been gradual and therefore undetected this far, but it seems to be becoming more rapid now and has already made strides spreading throughout your body. This is a very rare condition, so I don't have a lot to go on. But I can make something to alleviate the symptoms and slow your deterioration. We could extend your life by a few months, maybe."

He stares out the window, eyes distant and mouth pressed into a tight-lipped frown. "Okay," he says finally, when the silence is growing too long even for Porlyusica. "I should go."

"Come back next week." She drifts across the room and pulls the door open for him. "I'll have something for you by then."

"Okay," he says as he slips past her. Then, almost as an afterthought, "Thank you."

Porlyusica shuts the door behind him, but she tweaks the curtain aside just a hair to watch as he slowly walks away, hands shoved deep in his pockets and eyes fixed on the ground. She wonders how it feels to thank someone for handing you a death sentence.

It's unfortunate, but she is not prone to sympathy. Everyone dies sooner or later. He will just be sooner.

But she does go hunting for any text or medical treatise that might shed some light on his mysterious condition. She does not believe it can be fixed, and did not offer such a pale hope to him. The damage is too pervasive already. Irreversible. But maybe she can do something smaller.

She finds relevance in only the most obscure medical tomes. She finds nothing but speculation and theory on the causes, but she pulls bits and pieces together to outline the coming decline and formulate remedies. They will be experimental, but she has reason to believe that they will help slow his deterioration at least a little.

She sets aside her potions and projects and hobbies to work around the clock brewing medicines, tweaking and experimenting. They will still be here in a year or two. Gray will not.

She collects an array of remedies for his individual symptoms and fiddles with concoctions that might just prolong his life a little if they're lucky.

Occasionally, she takes a moment to wonder why she bothers. Why put her life on hold to scramble around in the dirt and throw together a collection of half-baked concoctions that may or may not help anything? It's not like it will change anything in the end. She's a healer, meant to heal people, save people. This boy is beyond saving.

But as a healer, she will work at healing as long as there's a body alive to heal. Healing is all about nudging the frail human body a little further from death when it veers too close. He is nosediving, but she can nudge him back. Maybe it will count for something.

Maybe not.

Maybe it doesn't matter either way.

* * *

The boy returns exactly one week later, face blank and eyes fathomless as he listens to her instructions and watches the half-dozen bottles clink together. He asks no questions, displays no emotion. The shadows in his night-dark eyes could swallow the world, and it seems a tragedy that such eyes could be worn by a child.

The Fairy Tail children had to grow up quickly and have faced danger and heartache and hardship more often than they ought, but they are still children. They still burn bright with the hope of the young and innocent. They go into their battles believing they will walk out again on the other side, victorious.

These are the eyes of a child faced with his own sobering mortality. They hold the recognition of a battle that can't be won. He is a child who has never truly seen the dark side of the world until now.

He asks no questions and offers few comments. Porlyusica doesn't press him, because he must walk this path on his own and she doesn't much care for chitchat anyway. He eyes the colored potions like they're poison, thanks her, and carts them away.

"Come by once a week for now," she says as he heads out the door. "We'll see how you react to the medicines and tweak things accordingly. Once we get your regimen figured out, we can probably scale back to once every two weeks or so."

He only nods, but he shows up at her cottage the next week, and every Saturday thereafter like clockwork. The shadows are gone from his eyes as if they'd never been there at all, like the clouds have parted and the gloaming lifted.

And he _never_ _shuts up_. Suddenly he's full of questions, comments, suggestions. What does this do? Would it help to up the dose of that? Could she find something to combat the nausea from this one? Is there an option with fewer side effects? Is there anything she can do about this symptom? If she adds more potions, would it help? Does he really need to take _that_ one? Can she make this one _taste_ better?

The last is so ridiculous that she loses her patience entirely and whacks him with a broom. She misses the days when he was quiet and sullen.

Maybe it should be encouraging that he's taking an interest and involving himself in his welfare instead of spiraling into darkness and depression, but Porlyusica is not reassured.

The one question he never asks is if she might find a way to cure him. Find a way to make him live. But his eyes are fever-bright with determination, and something else. Hope.

She pities him.

* * *

Porlyusica does what she can, experiments with medicines and dosages, lectures him on taking a break and acknowledging that he's ill instead of running around and pushing past his limits. But there is only so much she can do, and she has other patients.

Like Makarov, who is just as bad about running around like a spry young man instead of acknowledging his age and frailty. She visits the guild on occasion to check up on him or when he's not feeling well enough to make the trek out to her house.

It's on one of these visits, while she's chewing him out in the infirmary for overexerting himself yet again and ignoring the chest pains that have become more common as of late, that she hears an uproar out in the main guild hall.

She levels Makarov with a flat look. "Your brats are the loudest creatures I've ever had the displeasure of knowing."

He frowns, brows drawing together. "Something's wrong."

Porlyusica doesn't have enough experience to tell cries of distress from the normal raucous hubbub of merriment, but she supposes the master of the guild ought to know. She follows him out at a more sedate pace, not particularly concerned by guild drama. Her heart sinks as she realizes the concerned ring of mages is gathered around Gray, who is sitting on the ground.

"I'm fine, I'm fine," he grumbles, waving them off. "I just tripped."

"You did _not_ just trip," declares the red-haired girl with the glass eye, another former patient of Porlyusica's. "You passed out. Again."

"That's the same excuse you used on our job…" the blonde of the team adds. "I don't think you're okay." Her eye catches on the healer hurrying over, and she says, "Maybe Porlyusica can check you over while she's here."

Gray follows her gaze and groans. Porlyusica wonders if he'd be so nonchalant if she hadn't kept her visit on the down-low to avoid unnecessary human contact and he'd known she was here.

"Job?" she demands. "Were you fighting? I thought I told you to stop overexerting yourself. And you!" she adds, turning on his team with a fierce scowl. "What are you thinking, letting him go on your ridiculous fighting jobs in his condition?"

They blink back at her with big doe eyes, injured and innocent and politely puzzled.

"Condition?" asks the redhead. "What do you mean, _condition_?"

"Being stupid isn't a _condition_ ," the pink-haired dragon slayer adds with a snort.

Porlyusica stares at them in disbelief, wondering how they could be so dreadfully _stupid_ , but then she catches Gray's wince and the way his gaze is fixed to the floor and gets an inkling of a suspicion.

"You haven't told them?"

The boy picks himself up off the floor gingerly. His hands shake slightly as he dusts his clothes off—the tremors have been resistant to her remedies.

"Does it really matter?" he asks shortly.

She thinks it does. Maybe not for someone like her who avoids companionship and finds solace in solitude, but for someone like him who has friends and thrives in the social sphere and could have the greatest support system in the world. Going it alone for weeks has probably not been good for his sanity. She respects handling oneself _by_ oneself, but she thinks this boy could use someone to lean on.

Also, it would take away his cover for continuing to go on these ridiculous fighting jobs that she's convinced are shortening his lifespan. If she's putting all that time and effort into treating him, the least he could do is behave himself.

"Told us what?" asks the blonde.

The whole guild is drifting in, looking at the boy like he might be about to shatter and at Porlyusica like she has all the answers. The boy scowls at the ground and hunches his shoulders up around his ears, but she is not nearly moved enough by pity to keep his secrets for him.

"That he's dying."

If he could handle the news—if he _had_ to handle the news—then she sees no reason to soften the blow for his friends any more than she did for him.

Everyone blinks at her in disbelief, confusion. The dragon slayer starts laughing, the sound echoing and bouncing off the silent walls in loud peals. He catches sight of Gray's face and stops abruptly.

"What do you mean?" asks one of the other girls in a wavering voice. The drunk one.

"Exactly what I said."

Porlyusica's voice is clipped and short as she fills them in with more detail than necessary, refusing to gloss over the ugliest bits. She is too angry to bother holding back. She is angry at them for being too stupid to see what has been staring them in the face all along. Angry that Gray has hidden everything and forced her to spill his secrets for him. Angry that she has to say such ugly things at all. Angry that she is the one who will have to fight for him until the bitter end when there's no real hope. Angry at the world, maybe, because it isn't fair.

And then she watches in stoic silence as Makarov's brats cry and beg and question.

"Surely there has to be _something_ we can do?"

"Can't you save him?"

"Gray, why didn't you _tell_ us?"

Porlyusica, unmoved by their grief or the boy's discomfort, avoids Makarov's gaze and leaves. They can figure themselves out without her help.

Even avoiding the guild, she's made painfully aware that everything changes after that.

Wendy tries everything she can think of to heal anything she can, but she's only healing symptoms rather than problems. And even those are a tangled enough mess, with their roots twisted deep in his brain and throughout his body, that there's only so much that can be done to tease them apart. Other guild members are reading through books or searching out charms and spells to try. The dragon slayer and his cat run off again and again, searching for the thing that will be a miracle cure. She's not surprised by that one—that boy doesn't seem like the type to sit at the foot of a deathbed and hold someone's hand. Unlike the girls, who barely leave Gray's side. The blonde follows him around like a kicked puppy, and the redhead accompanies him to just about every appointment he keeps with Porlyusica and asks far too many questions.

There is always someone walking with him, checking in on him at his apartment, monitoring his symptoms, watching to make sure he can't sneak out on jobs. She's not sure he's even been allowed out on small jobs within the city limits, or that he can walk the length of a street without someone following. And as his symptoms continue to worsen, as his limbs shake and his magic slips away from him and he collapses without warning in the invisible throes of the seizures rattling his brain, his leash tightens ever further.

He has grown quiet and resigned again. The more his friends fuss over him, the quieter he gets. The more questions the redhead asks about his medication, the less he seems to care.

Porlyusica sees them smothering him. _She_ would be driven absolutely insane. But maybe this is the way it's supposed to be, when you have friends to worry about you. Maybe it's a good thing and he just hasn't quite realized it yet.

Still, she's starting to see why he didn't broadcast this.

The harder his friends fight for him and the more determined they are to win, the darker the shadows in his eyes deepen, snuffing the hope right out.

* * *

"Oh, just wait outside!" she exclaims finally when the redhead asks one question too many at the weekly check-up.

"But–"

"Shoo! You're smothering the boy. He can fill you in after. Or if you don't trust him to be honest about it, _I_ will. Now go!"

The boy manages to keep the relief off his face until his friend is out the door. "Thanks. I can't even breathe without them freaking out anymore."

Porlyusica fixes him with a hard look. "I don't care. That's between you and them. But now that she's gone, you can answer my questions honestly without sugarcoating everything. I expect the truth. The _whole_ truth."

She has quickly discovered that she will not get the answers she needs while his friends are lurking around. No matter how dark the shadows in his eyes or how deeply carved the lines of pain in his face, his smile is always the brightest and most plastic when they're hovering. She is not oblivious enough to have missed how his answers have become constrained and overly optimistic. When she asks how he's feeling, he does not say that his legs gave out underneath him in the shower or that he blacked out for a few minutes the day before. He says, 'fine'.

That might be all well and good for reassuring panicky guildmates, but it's the most useless kind of answer for a healer to figure out what's going on with your insides.

The boy hesitates but then relents. "I think the seizures are getting worse, and the numbness is still spreading. The medicines make me sick and tired and hazy. I can't focus on anything."

She hums in acknowledgement. His seizures are the invisible kind that rattle around in his brain to disrupt his thoughts and short-circuit his consciousness, but they're no less deadly for the lack of theatrics. Each one is damaging his brain further. And with the degeneration of his muscles and nerves, he's losing more and more sensation in his body, starting with the extremities and moving towards his heart. There is nothing she can do to stop this, but she makes a note to look for another option for preventing the seizures. Those are the root of a whole host of problems.

"I'll see what I can do," she says. "But honestly, what were you expecting? Medications have side effects. It's better than not treating the symptoms and dying earlier."

He's quiet for a moment as he looks out the window, eyes misty and distant. "Yeah," he says. "Of course."

Porlyusica eyes him but shrugs it off. She's not prone to sympathy and, honestly, she suspects that's the way he likes it.

From that point forward, anyone accompanying the boy to his appointments is made to wait restlessly outside the door. These meetings are sacrosanct, a communion between physician and patient. He's dying—the least they can do is give him a little privacy from time to time.

Nothing particularly noteworthy takes place during these brief handfuls of minutes. Porlyusica examines him, runs tests if she feels the need, assesses his collection of medications, and tracks his ever-changing—ever-worsening—constellation of symptoms. And he, for his part, obediently feeds her candid, painfully honest accounts of his physical complaints, any changes he's noticed, anything he wants her to check into. They talk little, exchanging no niceties and speaking only in terms of _symptoms_ and _illness_ and _dosage_. It's a transaction.

He says little after providing his update, just watches her silently with night-dark eyes that track her every move as she moves to and fro. Sometimes they are sharp and alert and catch the light to glimmer like spilled ink, like a hint of stars in a moonless sky. Sometimes they are dull and disinterested, or hazy and filmed over. That's when she knows the pain is especially bad or the small seizures shivering inside his skull are slowing his thoughts to a drizzle and making it impossible to focus. Or it could be the medicine, sometimes. He complains about it from time to time.

"It's better than dying," Porlyusica says curtly.

He nods and stays quiet and doesn't point out that he is dying either way. He never smiles.

Not until she shoos him outside again and he rejoins his friends. Then, suddenly, he finds his smile and words and good cheer again. Sometimes it upsets his friends more. Sometimes it reassures them until they can pretend he's not so bad after all, that he has time, and they can smile a little too and go back to almost normal for a few minutes.

He is a master deceiver, wearing his smiles like pretty feathered masks. It seems unnecessarily cruel of him to shut out his friends so completely and feed them spun-sugar illusions. But it's heartbreakingly sweet, in a way, that he will sacrifice so much of himself in a misguided effort to protect them from the darkness that clouded his eyes that first day. Maybe it is _necessarily_ cruel.

Porlyusica watches from afar, then shakes her head and shuts the door after him. She has other duties and projects to occupy her once he leaves, and she need not fuss and worry over him like the rest. She does not mean to get tangled up with him. It's business as usual, and she prefers it that way. She might have taken a proprietary sort of interest in him, but he is just another experiment, just another nameless subject in a long line of patients who have knocked at her door.

She watches the last weeks of his short life slip between his fingers like sand with as much detachment as she can muster.

He lasts a few months before collapsing in a fit of violent seizures outside the guild hall. When Porlyusica arrives, hurrying after the panicked flying cats, he is still writhing around on the ground in the throes of a grand mal seizure. This is new. He hasn't suffered this type of seizure before, and she can't quite make sense of it happening now. His vitals have been depressed and his symptoms worsening as time wears on, but this is a curveball of a different variety altogether.

She does what she can, shooing the others back and trying to make sure he doesn't hurt himself with all his thrashing. It's only when he finally stills that she can sit back and let out a breath and clear her head. And as he's hazily swimming back to consciousness, the answer slaps her in the face.

His friends crowd around in worry and relief, but she sees red.

"Back off," she snarls. "I need to examine him." And, upon seeing their mutinous expressions, " _In private_."

She grabs his arm in a death grip and yanks him to his feet, where he sways and blinks at her blearily. She drags him inside the building and back to the infirmary, heedless of his shuffling steps and unsteady gate. It's not really a good idea to jerk him about so much when he should be recovering, but she's livid and figures he's dying anyway.

She slams the door shut behind them in a fit of pique and shoves him down on one of the cots, where he curls up like a child. His eyes are still hazy, but wary now as he watches her.

"How long have you been off your medicine?" she demands.

The groggy cloud softening his features melts away and he darts a glance at the door. "I'm not–"

"I did you the courtesy of not bringing this up in front of your friends so that they didn't flip out. Now do me the courtesy of not lying to my face."

He slumps back over in the bed. Stupid he might be, but not stupid enough to miss the very real threat in her words. She could still drag the truth out in the open, and his friends would freak out appropriately and never allow him room to breathe again.

"I take them sometimes," he mumbles. "Just…"

" _Sometimes_ isn't good enough," she snaps back. "If you're skipping doses, they won't be nearly as effective."

"I know! Just… They make me feel awful and my mind gets so fuzzy that it's hard to focus on anything."

"At least you're alive."

"Barely! I don't feel like myself and I'm too miserable and disoriented to _do_ anything and…" He trails off and takes a deep breath as his eyes cloud over again. "I appreciate it, I really do, but sometimes I hardly feel like I'm alive at all. Sometimes I'd rather just live a few days with a clear head as _myself_ than a few weeks in a fog without the energy to do anything at all."

Porlyusica can't say she really understands him—she thinks she would do anything to fight for more time, because the time they do have is limited and precious—but she thinks she can sympathize with his impossible plight. A dangerous and undesirable feeling.

"Death is very permanent," she says. "At least if you're alive, you still have the chance to be with your silly human friends and think and feel and _be_. You'll have all the time in the world to be dead after. Take advantage while you can. You're too young to be giving up on your life so easily."

He stares at the wall for a few more seconds. "Yeah," he says dully. "I guess."

She eyes him sidelong, thinking he doesn't sound very convincing. "You _will_ take your medicine."

He closes his eyes and looks like a child wilted in the bed, resignation heavy in his voice as he says, "Yes."

Porlyusica nods once. She will make sure of it.

* * *

She visits him more frequently now and always makes him take his medicine while she's there. As long as she's satisfied that he's taking his potions, she holds her peace and doesn't enlist his friends to monitor him.

But although his precipitous decline slows once he's taking his medication regularly again, it does not stop. Over the next few weeks, he grows progressively weaker until he begins struggling with the simplest things. His magic is slippery and dangerous, leaking between his fingers in wild bursts of power when he tries to summon it. At first he tries to work with it more, searching for a way to keep it under control and mold it with his hands again, but Makarov pulls him aside and speaks quietly while watching him with sad eyes, and after that he does not try again. And with the loss of his magic, he also gives up on pestering his team to take him out on jobs and no longer even wanders town alongside them. His existence is confined to his small apartment and the guild hall and, every once in a while, Porlyusica's cottage.

But that would have happened sooner rather than later even if his spirit wasn't broken. His muscles give out seemingly at random, sending him stumbling or falling or dropping what he carries when his fingers loosen unexpectedly. The numbness creeping from his fingers and toes up his limbs is not helping matters on that front. His nerves decay rapidly alongside his weakening muscles. Porlyusica suspects it can be traced back to the dozens of small seizures rattling around his skull every day. More frequently, he blanks out in the middle of a sentence and then blinks at them stupidly, unable to remember what he was saying. Twice more, he falls into full-body seizures, although not nearly as bad as the first.

The medicines make him tired and groggy and nauseous, and Porlyusica can see the fog clouding his eyes. His friends don't know what to do with the zombie he's become, although they never give up on him. They never abandon him or stop searching for a miracle cure to save him. Still, they are mere shadows of their former selves, quiet and grim-faced, exhausted and teary-eyed.

And then, finally, the boy is put on bed rest. His friends and guildmates come often to visit him and there is always someone in the next room or at his bedside, but he spends most of his time curled in his bed and rarely summons the energy and strength to venture out of his apartment.

As much as it pains his guild to see him like this, they accept it because they have no choice. With constantly losing snatches of time and toppling over and occasionally collapsing in seizures, it's not safe for him to be wandering about anymore. Especially not by himself.

Porlyusica still kicks them out when she visits—and she visits more frequently than ever these days—but they never go far. They wait just outside the door, curled up on his worn sofa. When she leaves, they're instantly pushing past her to get at him again. The blonde brings stories to read him, the redhead constantly brings food to tempt him despite his nonexistent appetite and ever-present nausea, the dragon slayer chatters brightly nonstop as if to distract him, and the blue cat snuggles up against his side as comfort. Other guild members come and go with gifts and comfort of their own, but those four never seem to stray far. They're all looking for a way to cheer him up, coax life back into his eyes, give him a reason to keep fighting.

Porlyusica leaves as soon as she can after the check-ups, barely staying long enough to update his worried friends on his condition. She doesn't want to see their depressingly futile attempts to make him okay.

And then one day, the boy holds up his hand when she tries to hand him one of his medications from the bedside table.

"I'm done," he says with a sigh. "No more medicines."

She scowls. "I thought we already went over–"

"Look, I've tried. And I've had a lot of time to think over the last few months…when my brain isn't too scrambled, anyway. I can't do this anymore. The meds always have me in a fog, and… I don't know that I want to keep dragging out the inevitable. It's so miserable."

"Better miserable and alive than happy and dead," she said tartly.

"Maybe, but… This could drag out my life for what, a month or two? And during that time, I'll be miserable and half-awake and in such a fog that I barely even know myself half the time. I'd rather live half that time alert and able to be myself than double it as an empty shell. I can't appreciate what time I have when I'm only half-conscious, and I can't make the most of it with my friends. I need this. I need to be alive or dead, not stuck somewhere in the middle."

She regards him for a long time and then puts the bottle back down. "Well, I'm not going to force-feed you if you're going to kick up a fuss."

Relief flashes across his face, and a tension she hadn't noticed seeps from his body. He has obviously prepared himself for a fight and is relieved she hasn't given him one. But she doesn't doubt that he would have fought tooth and nail if she had disagreed. Despite everything, he still has a glint of steel in his eyes.

"Thanks," he sighs. The steely determination fades from his eyes, replaced by something anxious and uncertain. Something a little bit small and lost and overwhelmed. He darts a glance at the closed door across the room. "Please don't tell anyone. They wouldn't understand, and I don't want them to worry more. I don't want them to think I've given up."

Porlyusica is not sure she agrees with his choice, but she respects it. She remembers the steel in his eyes, the spark that hasn't yet been snuffed out by the pain and fugue. No, she doesn't think he's giving up. Not exactly. He still has some fight left in him—he's just choosing what battles to fight with the last of his remaining strength.

But he's right—that is not something the eternally hopeful warriors of the guild would have an easy time understanding.

"I won't be able to do much for you," she warns. "I can brew a couple natural remedies that aren't as potent, but they won't be able to do much more than ease the pain a little."

"That's okay," he says quietly. "That's good enough."

Porlyusica nods once. "Fine," she agrees.

She tries to avoid his friends as she leaves, but they catch her as usual. Today it's the blonde and Wendy. Perhaps the others are out on foolhardy quests again.

"How is he?" the blonde asks, eyes wide and anxious and innocent.

Porlyusica hesitates. "He's alert," she says finally. "He seems to be handling the medicine better. Now go pester him yourselves and leave me in peace."

"Thank you," Wendy says as the blonde rushes past to speak with Gray.

She looks much older than her handful of years, face careworn and eyes ringed with exhaustion. She isn't used to illnesses and injuries she can't heal, and has exhausted herself trying everything she can think of. This boy is a lesson to her: not everyone can be saved, and even a healer can only do so much. It's a lesson she would have learned sooner or later, but it's a pity the first target is one of her friends.

Porlyusica waves her off. There is nothing to thank her for, and now she is not even providing the cold comfort of her potions and herbs. She is the most useless kind of healer: obsolete, skills exhausted, healing no one at all. She has done what she can and it is not enough, and sometimes that seems worse than never having tried at all.

"Go on," she says as she heads for the door. "Maybe you can dull some of his pain. Either way, take advantage of what time you have left."

Because that is what the boy has decided to do, and it would be best if his friends did the same. Porlyusica is not prone to empathy, but she understands, just a little.

* * *

She visits just as frequently as ever, because the boy practically begs her to. If she stops, if she gives up and washes her hands of him, there will be questions that he doesn't want to answer. She considers refusing—there is little else she can do, and she has never been fond of wasting her time—but he won't last another month at this rate. It won't cost her much to humor him for a few more days.

So, two or three times a week—later, three or four or five when things hit rock bottom—she visits his apartment and kicks his friends out. She mixes up herbal remedies that aren't so harsh on his system and passes them off as yet more medicines to add to his collection.

They say little. What words can be exchanged between a healer that cannot heal and a boy that cannot live? She finds his presence uncomfortable, an itch beneath her skin. She does not like sitting around and doing nothing, and there is nothing else for her to do here. But he begs her to stay for a handful of minutes here, a half hour there. To make it seem, to his friends, that she is still doing something for him. Or maybe because he needs a break from the hovering.

He's not often talkative, maybe because he has to be while his friends are around in order to allay their concerns. He usually takes the opportunity to lie quiet in bed, eyes closed while he focuses on his breathing and works through the pain. Porlyusica brings a book and settles in the chair in the corner to read, every once in a while glancing at him over the top of the pages.

One afternoon, as she is snapping her book shut and preparing to leave, the boy says something other than the usual goodbye.

"Do you pity me?" he asks.

She eyes him uncertainly, not sure where he's going with this or what he wants to hear. Something about the sharp glitter in his eyes makes her hesitate when normally she'd blurt out whatever is on her mind. Now that his mind is not as fogged by the medicines, he seems to see too much and it unsettles her.

"I…sympathize with you," she says carefully, because she does not think he wants pity. Who does? And, as an afterthought, "Just a little."

"Hm." The glimmer in his eyes does not change, but he watches her like she is a puzzle that needs solving and works at peeling back all her layers. She resists the urge to shudder and thinks, maybe a little uncharitably, that she preferred it when his mind was too hazy for him to pierce the soul. "Maybe that was the wrong question. You don't care about me, do you? You won't care when I die?"

She shifts uneasily and wishes she were anywhere but here. "Death is always a tragedy," she says, choosing her words with care.

"But you care only as much as you would for any patient. It's nothing you would lose sleep over."

She does not appreciate the interrogation, especially because she does not know what he wants. She does not know, and she hates not knowing. She hates how he seems to be trying to make her look small and ugly, as if she should be ashamed that he is not the center of her world and feel callous for not getting worked up over every little human thing.

She hates it, and it makes her words sharp as knives as she gives up tiptoeing around the truth and trying to spare his feelings.

"Of course not," she snaps. "You're just one human in billions. You are no more special than any other human. You are exactly the same—no more, no less. I'm sorry that you will die, but I will not grieve you."

She turns away and storms out of the room, thoroughly finished with him.

As the door slams shut behind her, she thinks she hears him whisper, "Good."


	2. Part 2

* * *

**Part 2**

* * *

His friends think he is doing better, because he is bright-eyed and alert and full of good humor again. This could not be further from the truth, but somehow he is always smiles and sunshine when they are around. Only Porlyusica notices his gritted teeth and sharp breaths and the way his eyes are too gritty and bright to be truly sunny.

He is frank with Porlyusica, though. Whatever pretenses he feels the need to keep with his friends do not seem to apply to her. If anything, he has become even more direct.

"Awful," he says when she perfunctorily asks how he is feeling. "Sometimes I almost wish…"

He trails off, eyes going distant and glassy, and Porlyusica thinks that whatever his line of thought is leading to is something she might as well ignore. Then he shakes his head as if to shake the thoughts right out, and she decides to humor him after all.

"Wish what?" she asks brusquely, nose already buried in her book.

"Oh… Nothing, really. I suppose it doesn't matter, but I don't like entertaining grim thoughts when it already seems like I'm giving up."

"Are you?" she asks as she turns the page and squints in disbelief at the ignorance of the words scrawled there. It seems like just about anyone can try their hand at writing a treatise these days, however unqualified. This ridiculous rag will go in the kindling pile when she returns home, she decides. "Giving up?"

He's quiet. She isn't sure for how long since she's still distracted by the twaddle masquerading as actual science—full moons and wolfsbane, indeed!—but it's long enough that she begins to think the topic is closed and she is free to ignore him once more.

"I don't know," he says finally. "I didn't think I was. But everyone else would say I am, I think. It's not as much that I'm trying to die faster as it is that I'm tired of prolonging the inevitable at the expense of my sanity. I feel better without all the meds, like I'm still myself. I want to think that I'm not choosing to die—that would happen either way, right?—but choosing how to live the rest of my life."

"Glass half full," she says dryly, squinting at a perplexing diagram that seems to have no rhyme or reason to it.

"Huh?"

"Optimist."

"Ah." He chuckles a little breathlessly. "There's a new one. Maybe I'm finally learning positivity in the face of adversity."

"They'll figure it out eventually."

"I don't think so," he says, serious again. "Not unless I slip up. People tend to see what they want to see…and I'd rather they see that too."

"See you dying?"

"See me fighting."

"You humans and your pride," she huffs. "They won't understand, but they won't think you're weak. Although it would definitely be a pain to convince them not to intervene."

"I just don't want them to think it's like…"

Porlyusica senses the change in the air. She hears the rattling bones of the skeleton in the closet, the smothered trumpeting of the elephant in the room—the whisper of a secret. She finds that secrets bring nothing but trouble, and she prefers to stay out of them. But he's dying, after all, so what harm could it do? This book is a laughable waste of time, anyway, and she has nothing better to do until she can make her escape.

"Like what?"

He's quiet for a long time, and she shrugs it off and returns to trying to make sense of this drivel. He has already more than proven that he wears his masks close to his skin, keeps his cards tucked so close to his chest that they slip in and out between the fingers of his ribcage, cloaks his secrets and thoughts in silence and half-truths and pretty smiles. She thinks that he will take them all to the grave with him, because he has long since given up on sharing them with the people who care about him.

But then he sighs. "Have you ever heard of a spell called iced shell?"

She regards him over the top of her book, surprised he is still talking. "Not particularly. I know of many different magics, but I have little use for the particulars of most of them."

"Fair enough. It's a sacrificial spell that uses the caster's body to seal a threat in unmeltable ice."

She lowers the book a little and eyes him with sharp-eyed curiosity. "You made an attempt?"

He shrugs and fiddles with the blankets. "Natsu stopped me."

"Why?"

He raises an eyebrow in her direction, dark eyes sparkling. "Because he's too stubborn to let anything else kill me before he has the chance."

She scowls. "That's not what I meant."

He sighs, the humor fading from his eyes. "I was giving up, I suppose. My master, the woman who taught me magic, used that spell to protect me when I was a child. She was…like a second mother to me." He pauses and frowns in thought, and then his lips twist into a wry smile. "No, maybe not. We color the past with our nostalgia, I suppose. I wasn't in the right place to accept that. But she could have been."

Porlyusica can hear the bones rattling incessantly like wind chimes in the distance. She thinks that perhaps she was hasty to judge that he had never seen the dark side of the world until faced with a death he couldn't cheat. She senses the shadows in him, although she hadn't noticed before. She wonders if it was because she paid no attention or because he is a master of concealing what he does not want the world to see. He is a child yet, but he has an old soul. She wonders how much darkness lurks beneath the surface in Fairy Tail, how many of his friends wear smiles over knife-sharp edges.

"Ah," she says, baiting him. "So it was your birthright."

He shakes his head slowly. "No… I wasn't born like that. I was born happy, like most anyone else. No, it seemed more like…destiny, maybe."

"Hm," she says. She flips through the book, idly perusing the pages without much hope of finding something worth reading. The silence hangs heavy like a shroud for a full minute.

"I just…don't want them to think that I'm giving up again," he says finally, voice lowered to nearly a whisper.

Porlyusica turns the page. "So why don't you run off and find some big baddie to freeze, then? You're dying anyway, so why not? You're running out of time to fulfill your destiny."

"I…" He pauses, clears his throat. "I mean, I could, but… Maybe it's selfish, but I want to live what little time I have left, not throw it at the first thing that gets in my way just because it's not as much time as I want. I could do a lot of good for someone else with those last few days, but…I sort of want to keep them for myself. They're all I have left."

Porlyusica watches him overtop her book again. "No, you foolish human. That's not selfish. That's called not giving up."

* * *

"Let's take a walk," he says when she enters the room and closes the door behind her.

She raises an eyebrow, raking her considering gaze over his face. He seems more lively than usual, already crawling out of bed without waiting for an answer. She knows that he's started leaving the apartment again, every now and then. On the days when the pain isn't as excruciating and his limbs are at least pretending to behave, he ventures outside.

She hears his friends chattering about this progress excitedly, sees the hope sparking in their eyes. They are all too eager to relate trips to the bakery and jaunts around town and visits to the guild hall. She has warned them that he is dying, but on some level they want to hope that he can overcome even this in the end. And why not? Fairy Tail mages have always managed to cheat death before.

So she does not tell them that the reason he suddenly has more energy and spirit is that he's rejecting the medicines that prolong his life at the expense of his soul. She does not tell them that his short daytrips are one last macabre sightseeing tour of the places he loves and soon will be able to visit no longer. She does not tell them that his jokes and smiles and chats are really just goodbyes.

He is making the most of the time he has left, just as he said he would. Porlyusica will let him do with it what he will. Still, it is the first time he has asked to go anywhere with _her_.

"You won't make it far," she says. He is already pressing his fingers to the wall to steady himself, and his legs tremble.

"I never do," he says cheerfully. "It will just have to be far enough."

She does not caution him to be careful and not overexert himself. She has given up scolding him unless he is doing something _particularly_ stupid.

"Why don't you take your friends?" she asks instead.

He waves a hand airily. "I want to go now."

She lets out an exasperated breath. "Well, when you walk out the door past them, they're going to want to come." He grins and taps the glass of the window. She shakes her head. "Oh, no."

"It'll be fine! I go through windows all the time. We're on the first floor."

He pulls up the sash and clambers outside none too gracefully, stumbling as he goes. The days of hopping through windows with ease are long gone now. He turns and grins at her from the street, beckoning.

"Come on," he says.

Porlyusica eyes him like he just crawled out of a sewer. Nothing about this seems dignified.

"I don't think–"

"It's okay." He looks around in an exaggerated fashion. "No one will see you."

She hesitates, but then huffs out a breath, drops her book on the table, and slides over the sill with as much dignity as she can muster. He's in a good mood today, the cheer that's usually reserved for his friends and is worn thin by the time she comes around, and she decides to roll with it. Not because she cares, exactly, but maybe because she's curious to see what he's up to.

To his credit, he does not laugh at her inelegant display and almost manages to conceal his smile.

He shuffles down the street, a little unsteady on his feet but otherwise doing fine. He seems content to roam, occasionally pointing out this or that and reminiscing on what happened there. Porlyusica follows along beside him and says little until he stumbles again and clutches at the brick façade of a passing shop. His face is ashen and his brows pinched, and the tremors are getting worse.

"We should go back," she says. "Or sit down for a minute."

He smiles wanly, and it looks more like a grimace. "Just a little farther."

She shrugs. She's not his babysitter.

He makes it the last few yards out to the river, teeth gritted as he drags his feet step by painful step, and collapses on the bank with a huff. Porlyusica folds her legs beneath herself more gracefully, despite her arthritic joints. She would stand, but she is not sure he will be getting up any time soon.

She taps her fingers impatiently on her knees as he catches his breath.

"You know," he says finally, most of the wheeze gone from his voice, "an awful lot has happened out at this river."

She lets him ramble about the start of his friendship with the redhead, fighting with the dragon slayer, fishing with the cat. She listens to his stories in silence. She does not particularly want to, but she has been trapped by his company and has little choice. His eyes shine with the light of dying stars, burning brighter than ever before they sputter out.

They make her uncomfortable, so she watches the water rather than his face. If he thinks she isn't paying attention, he doesn't seem to mind. He spins his stories for maybe ten minutes before trailing off.

Porlyusica eyes him sidelong. His eyes are shadowed again, his lips twisted into a frown. He kneads at his forehead, undoubtedly in pursuit of relief from one of the increasingly frequent headaches.

"I'll miss them," he says quietly. Then huffs out a laugh that is only half amused. "Or maybe not. I don't really believe in anything after death. But…they'll miss me."

"I suspect so," she says, thinking of the pain and desperation and futile hope in the guild's eyes when they look at him. She will not debate the afterlife with him, because she is fairly certain he is right. "They care about you deeply."

"Yeah." He picks at the grass, threads it between his fingers. "It…would be easier if they didn't, I think. It will only hurt more."

Ah, and there it is, the reason he shows her his broken pieces but smiles when his friends come around. Because she does not care, not the way they do, and his darkness does not hurt her. She will not be plunged into grief watching his decline or bearing his death, so she is allowed to witness it.

"That _is_ the flipside of love," she says noncommittally. "It's difficult to have one without the other."

"Is that why you prefer to hate everyone?" he asks, his voice sharp. "Because it's easier? Hurts less?" She stiffens and levels him with a glare, and he relents with a sigh. "That was unsporting of me. Sorry. Still… I see the appeal. They'll be devastated. I don't want to make it any harder for them than it already is."

"What noble intentions to cloak your lies," she says acerbically, still smarting.

He huffs out a tired laugh. "Maybe. I'm trying to protect them, but also myself. Because they will grieve for me, but I'm already grieving for them since I know what's coming. Grief is a rather selfish emotion, don't you think? We grieve for the dead, but they're beyond our pity. They aren't sad or hurt or anything anymore. They're gone. We grieve for ourselves more than anything. For what—who— _we've_ lost. But I can't really judge. I was the same as a kid, I think."

Porlyusica watches the clouds float by in wispy sheets and digs down into the grass until she can rub the grit of soil between her fingertips. She has never been one for speculation and philosophy. She likes cold, hard facts. She likes things she can touch. It has been a long time since she has allowed herself to question.

"It is selfish," she says finally. "And yet. We also mourn because the departed cannot. We mourn what they have lost, as well as what we have. The lost opportunities. The dead miss out on what could have been, and we pity them for it. Grief is for everyone, I think."

The boy makes a small noise, although she can't decipher what it means. His eyes are narrowed and thoughtful as he gazes out over the water, but his face gives nothing of his thoughts away.

Porlyusica tolerates it for a few minutes before shifting uncomfortably in the long grass. Her bones are too old and achy for the ground. They don't want to return until they are safely buried beneath it.

"We should go back," she says. "Your friends will notice us gone and come looking."

"Just a little while longer."

"But–"

"I have a lot of memories here," he says wistfully. "A lot of memories I want to remember. I'm getting weaker. I might not make it back again. Let me have a minute to say goodbye."

They lapse into silence. Porlyusica does not press him again, just watches the river and imagines the water swallowing his memories whole.

When he finally picks himself up, she rises silently beside him. He does not comment when she takes his arm and half drags him back through the city. She does not comment on how he can barely stay on his feet even with the support, and does not agree that he is probably right.

* * *

"Why do you hate people so much?" he asks a few days later. He is back in bed again, sitting up against the headboard. As far as Porlyusica can tell, he has not ventured from his apartment since their jaunt to the river. She wonders if he will.

"Why wouldn't I?" she asks. "You humans are all _insufferable_ creatures, filled with hate and fury. Even the less irritating take great delight in fighting and waging war. And," she adds pointedly, withered fingers plucking at the pages of her book, "they cannot seem to be _quiet_ and leave me to my reading."

He is unruffled and merely regards her thoughtfully. "Then why did you become a healer? If you hate people so much?"

"You'd all be dead without one," she says tartly, then sighs in irritation as he raises his eyebrows and looks unconvinced. "I don't care so much about the patients. I like the challenge of mending what is broken. It fascinates me."

"Then why not heal animals? Or tend a garden?"

"Because that is not the same," she snaps.

"Why not?"

"Because…" She trails off.

She has always known where she stands, never lacked conviction, but now she feels like she's on unsteady footing. No one has _asked_ her before. She has never had to explain herself. She has always been the cantankerous old misanthrope lurking in the background, only called forth when some fool has pushed their body beyond its limits. She is very rarely addressed as a _person_. It is something she encourages, but she finds she is woefully unprepared for such a confrontation now.

"Because you are horrible, spiteful creatures," she says slowly, "but you should at least have the chance to improve yourselves. There's not much you can do to redeem yourself once you're dead."

He hums quietly to himself and slumps back against the pillows. "Yeah, I can see that. I almost died a couple times as a kid, and I was a horrible thing. I'm glad I had the chance to grow up and become someone better."

Porlyusica shoots him a look, because he is not as grown up as he should be and ought to have another sixty years to figure himself out, but she says nothing because he already knows.

"You came from Edolas, right?" he asks, changing the subject abruptly. "It's a pretty different world, isn't it? It must have been scary getting thrown into a crazy world with people who were sort of the same but not."

She shifts in the chair, wondering when the cushion got so hard. She isn't sure how she feels about him turning the conversation on her when usually it's firmly focused on him. As a rule, she does not talk about herself. As a rule, no one cares enough to ask in the first place.

"I suppose," she says.

"What was it like discovering that magic is real here, that people just have it inside them?" His face is wide open and curious, and she still doesn't understand why he's interested.

"Strange," she says shortly. "But also…fascinating." Despite herself, she thinks back to when she first fell to Earthland all those decades ago, her wide-eyed wonder at the magic that was so second nature to its strange inhabitants. It has been a long time since she's thought of it. She was a different person then—these children would not believe it was her if they saw. "I took science to it and tried to figure it out. And healing ended up being somewhere in the middle."

"Were you ever jealous?" he asks. She wonders if his questions are born of his preoccupation with losing his magic. He has compared it to losing all his limbs at once. "What magic would you want to have, if you could?"

"The magic to steal the voices of chatty humans," she says, and he grins. She does not dwell on his first question. She has long since come to terms with her place in this world, and she no longer dreams of waking up with power at her fingertips.

"If you had healing magic like Wendy on top of all your other healing stuff, you'd be pretty unstoppable."

"Death would still win in the end," she cautions. "Not everything can be healed, no matter how strong your herbs and magic."

His smile is a little wistful this time. "Fair enough." He's quiet for long enough that Porlyusica goes back to her book, satisfied that he has finally decided to leave well enough alone, but then he blurts out, "Are you afraid of death?"

If the conversation was making her uncomfortable before, it is a hundred times worse now. She is no therapist, and she should not be the one helping him come to terms with his impending demise.

"Why should I?" she asks. "I'm not the one who's dying."

This might be unnecessarily cruel, but she intends to shut this line of conversation down from the start. Unfortunately, the boy does not seem deterred.

"I thought it might be something on your mind too. You know, since you're like a hundred."

Her head snaps up, and the boy is all wide-eyed innocence with a hint of a cheeky smile tugging at his lips that he can't hide.

"You think I'm _how_ old?" she demands.

"Not a day over twenty," he says promptly, the mischief glittering bright in his eyes. She thinks she preferred it when his mind was too clouded for him to sharpen his tongue.

She grumbles a slew of unflattering epithets under her breath and turns back to her book, intending to ignore him. She'll give him two more minutes and then leave him to his friends' tender mercies.

But then he asks, so softly that she almost misses it and she's not entirely sure whether he meant her to hear at all, "Are you?"

She stares down at the page, unseeing. She's quiet for a long time, sifting through the feelings his incessant probing uncovers.

"Yes," she says. "I'm running out of time too. Maybe that's why I became a healer in the first place, because I have always been afraid of death and wanted to learn how to protect myself from it. There were no noble intentions—it was always a selfish occupation. But I never pretended it was otherwise, did I?"

"You still help people too," he says. "But either way, I don't think it's selfish. I think it's not giving up."

Gray leaves her shaken. He has carefully peeled back her layers and is suddenly seeing her as a person just like him. And it worries her that she is starting to see him as one too.

* * *

"My parents died when I was little," Gray says a few days later. He looks small and shrunken huddled beneath the covers, without the strength to sit up. His friends have been accosting Porlyusica more frequently as of late, terrified by his fading. He doesn't have much left in him. "They were killed by a demon. One of the demons of the Books of Zeref, actually."

Porlyusica practically squirms in her seat. She is not sure she wants any more of his stories, and even less so a tragic one.

"Why don't you tell your friends?" she asks. "I know you don't want them to–"

"They already know," he interrupts. "Not necessarily because I wanted them to, but it got dragged up eventually. Anyway, the demon destroyed the whole city. As far as I know, it might have killed everyone but me. And then my master, the one who taught me magic, found me while poking around the rubble with her apprentice. She took me in and taught me her magic and tried to knock some sense into me, but I was still grieving and angry. I hated everything, you know? The world wasn't fair and the people I loved were dead, and I hated everything that was left because it wasn't enough."

Porlyusica thinks back to the questions he asked her about hating people, about feeling out of place and alone. She wonders.

Gray's eyes are fever-bright and glassy, and she's glad she can't see whatever he's seeing.

"And so I ran after the demon, because what did I have left to lose?" He huffs out a hollow, bitter sort of laugh. "I was going to kill it or die trying. But my master, she came after me. And when not even she could kill the demon, she sacrificed herself to save me and sealed it with iced shell. I could never forgive myself for that, because she died protecting me when I didn't even want to live. I knew I would probably die going after the demon—I just didn't care."

Porlyusica watches wide-eyed, not sure how to reconcile the boy she's grown to know with the picture he's painting now. That's not how a child is supposed to think. Children are supposed to have some time to grow up before learning what a terrible place the world can be.

"And then later," Gray says, his voice wavering just a little, "when I tried to use iced shell myself… There have been times when I wanted to die, you know? Or just didn't care enough to live. But now…" He chokes on his laugh like a sob, and his eyes are shiny with tears. "Now that I'm actually dying, I don't want to die anymore. _Now_ I want to live. Isn't that just the grandest joke of all?"

He curls into a ball beneath the blankets and hides his face in the pillow. His whole body shakes and his choppy breaths rattle in his throat as he sobs in earnest.

Porlyusica half rises and reaches out a hand, but leaves it hovering in the air. She does not do comfort, and has no idea how to go about it even if she wanted to start now.

In all the months since his diagnosis, she has not seen Gray break down like this. He has never, not once, admitted how afraid he is, how unfair it is, how he wants to live and it kills him that he cannot. He has never cried like this.

At least not when anyone is watching.

"I'm scared," he gasps, voice breaking and muffled in the pillow.

The raw emotion in his voice drags Porlyusica forward another step, tugging dangerously at something in her heart. Her fingers stretch a little farther, her resolve wavers a little more.

"Gray…"

He looks up, pale face—positively pallid, ghastly white with skin pulled tight over the sharp angles of his cheekbones—streaked with tears and dark eyes—she stares into the void, and the void stares back—glistening. She can't catch her breath.

"You don't care, right?" he asks in a small, breaking voice. He seems so small, suddenly. Truly a child.

Porlyusica's hand drops back to her side.

"No," she says, the word broken glass in her throat. "Of course not."

And because she does not care, she is permitted to sit at his bedside and watch him break.

* * *

The weaker Gray grows, the more desperate he seems to talk. About anything, everything, but mostly himself.

He's doing it to his friends, too. When Porlyusica comes over to check on him, he always seems to be talking to the people gathered at his bedside. When he's awake, at least, which is becoming less common. But he talks to them about happy things: happy memories, bright futures he won't be a part of, silly jokes. And feelings, which seem to unnerve his friends more than anything else.

"He always _shows_ he cares, but he's never so open to _talking_ about it," the redhead says, her face all pinched up. "It's weird."

The blonde seems to understand first.

"He's saying goodbye!" she wails, fleeing the room in tears.

Porlyusica says nothing as she edges past into the room and shuts the door behind her. That, she suspects, is _exactly_ what's happening.

Even once it's too much effort to feign happiness for any length of time, he can always summon up a frail smile and keeps his calm when his guild is in the room.

It's a different story with Porlyusica. Sometimes he's calm enough, even feeling positive enough to chat about lighthearted things. Sometimes his calm is tinged with melancholy, and so are his stories and words. Sometimes he's sunk so far down into his depression that he barely bothers trying to speak at all. And sometimes, deteriorating in tandem with his mind and body, he falls into feverish, desperate fits where the words won't stop pouring out of him in disjointed ramblings.

Porlyusica sits in the chair at his bedside with her book open on her lap and pretends to read while she listens. She wishes she could tune him out, run back to her cabin in the woods and go back to ignoring the world, but she doesn't. She can't. Whatever spell he's woven over her is too sticky to escape.

He talks about his family and his friends, about how he got his ever-present necklace and every scar. He tells her about everyone he has ever loved or hated, every sacrifice he's ever made for the people he cares about and every selfish, uncharitable thought he's had that they don't deserve. He talks about his dreams and nightmares, the goals he'll never meet and the futures he'll never have.

But mostly he talks about the past in all its gruesome detail, everything from Deliora to the time mage's sacrifice to finding his father in a demon guild. He talks about the good too, about the family he had and the family he's made and the family he's lost and recovered, but it seems like he uses it all up with his guild and has only the broken and ugly left when Porlyusica comes around.

He cracks his ribcage wide open to bare the bloody heart beating beneath, and once he finally opens up, it all pours out of him like lifeblood slipping between his fingers. It's like he can't stop. It frightens Porlyusica, because she has never known anyone so intimately as she knows Gray in those last few weeks. By the end, after he's moved on from his memories and detailed every thought and feeling he's ever struggled with, she feels like she knows him better than she knows herself.

As for the other things he says, the insecurities and guilt and broken thoughts… Well, those are meant for her ears alone, and she will never breathe a word of them to anyone.

She doesn't interrupt, either, or ask him to stop. He is running out of time, and the words can't leave his mouth fast enough.

She only gets breaks when his mind begins slipping into hazy half-awareness even without the medicines. He sleeps more and more. It's hard to wake him up, and even harder to bring him to full awareness rather than groggy twilight.

"I just… I thought we'd have more time," the blonde whispers as everyone gathers round to watch the slumbering boy. His breathing has become so shallow, his face so pinched and pale, that he looks dead enough already.

Porlyusica does not say what she is thinking, which is that of _course_ there wasn't as much time as they expected, because even after everything, they never quite accepted that he would die at all. They believed they could save him, right to the very end. She also does not say that they are right because Gray gave up on the medicines too early. That is just another of his secrets she will carry to the grave.

In the last few days, the words seem to dry up. Gray is mostly unconscious, and doesn't have the energy to say much of anything even when his eyes are cracked open in half-crescents. Now that he's spilled himself out, there's nothing left to say. He has no more of himself to give. Even his friends are met with blank, glassy stares and silence.

Porlyusica continues to sit in the chair at his bedside with her book open on her lap and pretends to read while she listens to the silence.

* * *

One day, Porlyusica lets herself into Gray's room and he is sitting up against the pillows propped against the headboard. His eyes are quick and sharp, like the boy she first remembers meeting, rather than dulled and faded. He looks more alive than he has in weeks.

"You're awake," she observes. Yes, _brilliant_ deduction, Porlyusica.

A faint grin flickers across Gray's face. "So I am. I know you've missed my _scintillating_ conversation."

Porlyusica sighs. She has, but she hasn't.

"And what, pray tell, do you want to prattle on about today?"

His grin flattens into something softer. "Nothing, really," he murmurs. He leans back, eyes flickering closed, and she thinks he will soon be floating off in unconsciousness again. "I don't have much left to say, I guess."

"Goodness knows you've already said more than enough," Porlyusica grumbles, because that's her job and she certainly hasn't gone soft.

Gray hums quietly, and they sit in silence for a few minutes. Porlyusica tries to read but always finds her gaze drawn back to him, assessing his condition. It's hard to judge. It always has been.

"Thank you," he says finally.

She raises one eyebrow. "For what?"

"For listening, I guess. I know I haven't been the most… _pleasant_ company." A faint smile tugs at the corners of his mouth again. Self-deprecating, almost. "I've never told anyone those things, you know. Never really wanted to. I never much liked talking about myself or my past. But you know… I'm going to be dead soon, and I realized that I've never told anyone anything. When I'm gone, I'll just disappear and no one will even know who I really was anymore. I thought I wanted it that way, until it was actually happening."

Porlyusica shrugs. His brutal honesty doesn't unnerve her anymore. She understands the paradox of wanting to keep things private but also wanting to be seen by someone, although she doesn't think she would ever take the plunge and spill all of her secrets in the first ear she ran across. But she supposes that everyone faces death differently, and who is she to judge when she has not been in his place and has not yet looked death in the eye? She doesn't yet know how she will react when that day comes, no matter how many times she has imagined it.

"I don't suspect you'd disappear," she says. "You seem to have made a big impression on your guild—they'll remember you. At least the good pieces, the ones you've shown them. Not," she adds fatalistically, "that I'd imagine it will do you much good while you're rotting in the ground."

Gray laughs. "I knew there was a reason I kept you around. You're always such a charmer."

Porlyusica sniffs. "Flattery will get you nowhere."

"No, I don't suppose it would. Not with you." He coughs weakly and twitches. Even his spasms have been getting weaker. He sighs, and Porlyusica hears the humor draining from the sound. "I'm sorry," he says. "I'm afraid I've been using you."

Her eyebrows climb back up her forehead. "For what? You rejected my medicines, so I suppose it would have to be my witty charm and good looks."

Gray almost smiles. "I knew I could make a sense of humor rub off on you eventually." She snorts derisively, and he sighs again. "I wanted to just be totally honest for once in my life. No masks, no secrets, no half-truths. And I was honest with the guild too, but only about the good stuff. It's already really hard on them, you know? They didn't need all the ugly crap too.

"You were just convenient because you didn't care. You weren't going to miss me or mourn me, so you could take all the bad and ugly and be unaffected. But that wasn't really fair to you either. It was pretty selfish, but I guess I was kind of desperate."

Porlyusica fiddles with the book's pages absently. None of her books have prepared her for what happens when a dying boy barges into her heart and tramples everything before slipping back out. Honestly, she had thought she was better than this.

"Maybe selfish," she says. "But also not giving up. We do what we have to in order to survive another day with our spirits intact."

Gray snickers. "You're getting maudlin in your old age."

She glares. "Excuse me?"

But she doesn't have the energy to be angry. Selfish or not, Gray has also taken the time to ask Porlyusica about herself and converse with her like an equal—a friend, almost—when few others do. And as uncomfortable and unsettling as it is—as it is, she suspects, for both of them, as neither is accustomed to letting down their walls—it's something she might…miss. It's something she might miss when he's gone.

Gray grins and fumbles with the chain around his neck. His fingers shake and twitch, and it takes four tries for him to undo the clasp. Porlyusica watches. She is not in the habit of giving aid unasked for, and he is not in the habit of accepting it.

Finally, he coils the chain in his palm and hands it over. Porlyusica eyes it in distaste.

"Here," he says.

"Why? For what?"

He shrugs. "I don't know. You can keep it. You're the only one who knows the story behind it, anyway. And this is something my friends can use to obsess over when I'm gone. Chuck it in the river, bury it in the garden, sell it for a few jewels. I don't care. I won't have any more need of it."

Porlyusica gives him a sharp look but takes the necklace. She won't do any of those things, and he knows it.

"Thanks," he says. "For everything."

Porlyusica closes her eyes. She realizes what's happening. As the blonde realized before, Gray has been saying his goodbyes to his friends. And now, finally, he is saying goodbye to her.

"Shall I send in your loudmouthed friends?" she asks, pulling herself to her feet.

"Yes, please do. Might as well, since I'm finally awake enough to talk to them." Gray's smile fades, and his eyes are sad as he studies her face. "It's still okay, right? You'll be okay?"

Porlyusica clears her throat and turns away. "Of course. I've never been one for caring."

"I'm sorry," Gray says softly, and his voice is as sad as his eyes.

Porlyusica pretends not to hear. "I'll send in your friends." She pauses in the doorway, fingering the cool metal of the chain winding about her palm. "I don't believe in any sort of life after death either. But my mother did, and she was always a far sight smarter than me."

"A mother?" Gray asks with a breathy chuckle. " _You_?" And then, quieter, "Yeah, my mom did too."

"Fewer things in this world are more stubborn than a mother," she says wisely, as if she has a great deal of worldly experience in such matters. "If anyone can reshape life and death, it's them."

"Fair enough." There's just a hint of a smile in his voice. "I'll see you on the other side, then. I guess there's no point giving up so close to the end."

No, Porlyusica thinks, there isn't. Whatever they do or don't believe, it's not like they _know_. Gray is nothing if not a fighter. There's no point thinking it's the end until it's over. He's come too far to give up now.

"I'll see you later, then," she says as she walks out the door.

"Goodbye," he says quietly.

* * *

Porlyusica does not go to the apartment the next day. She sits in the chair by her window and looks out over her garden, rubbing the silver chain between her fingers. She is not surprised when Makarov knocks on her door later that evening, tears clouding his eyes.

She is not surprised when he tells her that Gray is dead.

She does not mourn, because she promised she would not. But she holds Gray's necklace in her hand and stares out the window and remembers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I said this was kind of a character study of Gray from an unusual perspective and it is, but I wanted to explore Porlyusica's character a little too. She's basically a non-entity and we don't know too much about her, but it's hard to write a story from someone's POV and not try to get in their head at least a little. I dunno, I have kind of a soft spot for her after she popped up in scenes from the "Because" verse, "Recon", "Heat Stroke", etc. I didn't really want to get too in-depth, but I admit that I enjoyed the challenge of unwrapping her personality just a little. And it made me appreciate her outside-looking-in perspective of Gray and his struggles more too, so that was a bonus.
> 
> And poor Gray deserves better than we give him X) I almost feel bad killing him off again lol

**Author's Note:**

> Frankly, this was originally supposed to have more of a focus on how the team reacts to Gray hiding the whole dying thing, but I figure it's already been done to death and I can always do it in a different fic. This one didn't cooperate. Maybe because Porlyusica doesn't care lol


End file.
